


Four Hundred Fifty-Three

by violue



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Mentions of Death, Mentions of Violence, it's about souls in Hell, mentions of rapists
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-18
Updated: 2015-12-18
Packaged: 2018-05-07 08:30:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5450102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/violue/pseuds/violue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“And I got off that rack. God help me, I got right off it, and I started ripping them apart. I lost count of how many souls.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Four Hundred Fifty-Three

**Author's Note:**

> Unbeta'd, so if you notice a typo or something please let me know. And I only went with "no archive warnings" because I couldn't decide if any applied or not.

A long, long time ago, Dean told Sam the very abridged version of his time in Hell.

“And I got off that rack. God help me, I got right off it, and I started ripping them apart. I lost count of how many souls,” he’d said.

That was a lie. He remembers the number. Four hundred fifty-three souls over the course of over three thousand six hundred days spent in Hell off the rack. There were chunks of time where Dean was visiting a new soul every day, and periods he spent with the same soul for months.

He only spent one day with Bela.

He doesn’t remember all of their names or faces, but he remembers that number. Four hundred fifty-three.

That number is always with him, even now.

Sometimes when he’s perched at a table in the bunker, mind drifting while he works with Sam and Castiel to read over piles of tomes, Dean will find himself scribbling “453” in the corner of a page, then scratching out the number with his pen before they notice.

Dean heard many of their stories. The souls would tell him, or Alastair would tell him, whispering their crimes into Dean’s ear in a cruel, singing tone. Sometimes he knew nothing about them. Not all of them even spoke English. Who knows what the woman who used to babble in endless streams of Italian was trying to tell him.

The thing about Hell is… it’s Hell. Aside from the people that sold their souls like him, if they were in Hell, it was usually because they deserved to be there. There weren’t people that committed suicide, or stole a wallet, or lost control of their car and accidentally killed someone, or took a life in self defense. Most of the souls Dean interacted with were murderers, rapists... cruel, vicious people.

But under torture, that for the most part faded away. The screams of a man who murdered four people sounded the same as the screams of a man who sold his soul to save his failing construction company. The cruel, the proud, the self righteous, they all crumbled and wept under Dean’s blade. The woman that bombed an abortion clinic in Iowa and accidentally blew herself up in the process, she begged for God to come save her, and it sounded no different than the woman that sold her soul for ten more years with her dying husband.

It’s been a long, long time since Dean was in Hell. He’s died more than once since then, but it’s still with him.

He’ll hear a child laughing in a restaurant and remember Alice, the woman that killed two children and then had a heart attack and died while evading the authorities. Or he’ll be shelving books in the bunker and think about Prateek, a serial rapist that worked at a library in northern India. Often talking with Crowley reminds Dean of Andrew, a smarmy, British asshole that bilked hundreds of good people out of their fortunes and ruined their lives.

Dean’s experienced the cold, endless loop of Heaven, the eternal battle of Purgatory, the quiet loneliness of the ghost plane. None of that compares to the screaming, writhing pit of Hell where he spent most of his time when he was in damnation. There were quieter areas, but Dean frequented them less and less as the number of souls he tortured grew. Quiet meant thinking. Thinking meant lamenting on the screams of that day’s soul, maybe feeling guilty over it.

Maybe realizing how satisfied it made him.

There was a man, Louis. He assaulted and murdered fourteen women while on a nine day vacation in Russia, then returned to his life in Quebec like nothing had changed. He had a wife, two sons, a good job, and he lived another thirty years before he died peacefully in his sleep. He told these things to Dean freely, gleefully. He lived a life free of justice for his crimes. No one ever knew what he had done, other than his victims. He’d never been punished. Dean spent sixteen months with him. He felt like Justice then, like he was getting revenge on behalf of those fourteen women. Louis screamed, he begged, he cried, but he was never, ever sorry for killing those fourteen women. When he wasn’t sobbing in agony he would sometimes describe his kills, muttering them aloud like precious memories he was clinging to in order to maintain his sanity. Even for Hell, it was disturbing. Most days Dean found ways to render him silent.

Many nights Dean has fallen asleep thinking about Louis, wondering if he’s escaped Hell in a flurry of black smoke yet. Some day he will. He’ll be a demon, and Dean will have helped make him into one. He might not even remember Dean by the time his soul sheds its human form, but Dean will never forget him.

Dean might not remember everyone, but he remembers Louis. And Prateek. And Alice. And Andrew. And dozens of others that pop in his head at inopportune moments.

And he remembers that number. Four hundred fifty-three.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I was watching Heaven and Hell from season four this morning and this came out.
> 
> I guess this is what comes out of me when I'm not writing tooth rotting domestic fluff. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯


End file.
